Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

The choice of the enemy will not be totally arbitrary, even when it is at heart an irrational choice. It must seem rational to the hater, which is the basis of rationalization. The choice may be territorial—bearing some historic rationalization for the current hatred—or the enemy may be selected on ideological grounds. In either case, it is my thesis that the choice will always be in the service of scapegoating.

Scapegoating

Jean-Paul Sartre, in his brilliant (but deeply flawed) essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, made two profound observations.55 He indicated: “Anti-Semitism . . . is something quite other than an idea. It is . . . a passion.”56 And later, the much-quoted statement: “Far from experience producing his [the anti-Semite’s] idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”57 These two statements expand the concept of hatred beyond a mere emotional experience and beyond the confines of reality.

An enemy is defined as a “foe”: “One who feels hatred toward, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of another.” Enmity, real enmity, exists between nations as between individuals. There are opposing personal and national interests that are perceived as threatening. I use the word “perceived” because with the perspective of hindsight, many conflicts—in both the individual and the national arena—that were fought on the assumption of real injury or threat proved to be conflicts of ego. It is hard to discern the “real” principles defended in the monstrous slaughter of World War I. Still, there were and will be true enemies and legitimate conflicts, but those are a minority. For hate-driven groups such as the Nazis, Al Qaeda, or the Ku Klux Klan, the enemy is more often a convenience than a true threat. The enemy is a necessary device to alleviate a sense of shame, humiliation, and impotence. If no traditional enemy is at hand, one must be created.

The enemy becomes an essential ingredient in the life of the haters. Like a delusion, it is created to serve the needs of the hater. And also like the typical symptom, it invariably represents a displacement of a conflict from the internal world of the person to an outside agency. We alleviate our internal conflicts and protect our self-esteem by placing the source of our misery outside of our own area of culpability; we find some other to blame. After having found that other, we can absolve ourselves of responsibility; view our inadequacies as products of external assault; and vent our spleen on the enemy, taking comfort in “fighting back” rather than suffering the humiliation of passive acceptance. An enemy adds purpose, passion, and hope to a dismal existence. The enemy must be found, and if one is not readily available in the political or social world around us, an enemy must be created out of whole cloth. The true purpose of an enemy will be to serve the modus vivendi, the lifestyle, of the hater. Understanding hatred requires treating it as a metaphor and searching for the symbolic displacements.

The classic and most direct example of displacement occurs in Leviticus with the story of the sacrificial goat, the literal scapegoat.

And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, even all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of an appointed man into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land which is cut off.58

In the biblical text, the story of the scapegoat depicts a symbolic gesture, a metaphor to show God’s mercy and forgiveness. The displacement is conscious and its meaning apparent to the participants. The goat was, along with bullocks and rams, a traditional sacrificial animal and seems arbitrarily selected. When Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery,” a modern fable of scapegoating, substituting a human member of the community for the goat, the story became an instant classic of terror.59 This simple tale, told in everyday language, exploited an element of human nature as a vehicle for horror: We do not want to know that we are prepared to sacrifice the innocent for our own purposes. When we commit moral crimes for selfish reasons, we want to pretend that we commit these wrongs in the service of the good. We deny we are attending anything so trivial as our ego, but claim we are serving God and country.

Scapegoating, as used today, is an attempt to place our own transgression onto the shoulders of a target group. The purpose is no longer to seek God’s forgiveness in penitence and honesty but rather to avoid guilt by denying responsibility. Therefore, the displacement is unconscious—otherwise it would be simple deceit—its purposes disguised from both victim and victimizer. And the sacrificial group is rarely arbitrarily selected. To maintain the self-deception, the selection must be sufficiently artful in design to seem credible. The displacement must be of such a nature that it seems to make sense. The scapegoated group will, however, always carry some symbolic clue as to the nature of the internal conflicts that they are symbolically being used to resolve.

The severity of the anxiety that tortures a psychotic individual demanding respite is such that the rationalization that will be used to explain it must be of a proportionate dimension. A patient must fabricate a monstrous evil. If the person turns to hypochondria to rationalize his anxiety, the disease he selects must be equal to his terror. It will not do to perceive his imaginary illness as chicken pox or conjunctivitis. In order to rationalize severe anxiety, he will perceive symptoms of cancer or heart failure. Similarly, with the classic paranoid delusion, the forces opposing the individual must also be perceived